Purposes of Training

The explicit goal of all training is to make individuals providing CI more effective and efficient, make existing and potential end users of CI into better customers, control unreasonable expectations and prevent improper requests by existing end users, and attune the entire enterprise to the existence of CI efforts so that data collection efforts can become more efficient and widespread over time.

The experience of the Best Practice CI firms shows that such ongoing training also has several key implicit goals, which are intimately linked to the process of institutionalizing CI (covered in Chapter 14). They are:

• Generate and support organizationwide knowledge of, and participation in, CI.

• Link end user successes with CI activity through training connections.

In other words, in the context of CI, training is not merely training, it is also an affirmative form of marketing as well. In fact, a recent study made three specific recommendations for "marketing" competitive intelligence activity inside a firm:

• First, demonstrate the value-adding nature of CI activity, that is, show end users, management, and all employees that there is a bottom-line impact to an effective CI effort. While the importance of any CI should be intuitively obvious, experience shows that CI units are often asked to provide proof that CI is beneficial to the company. For more on that, see Chapter 16.

• Second, conduct extensive promotion efforts to create awareness of and acceptance of CI and, ultimately, assistance for current and future CI efforts.

• Third, lower the costs of participating in CI activities, that is, make sure the benefits of providing data to the CI staff exceed the cost to the individual employee helping the CI effort.